M3Retrieve: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval for Medicine

Arkadeep Acharya, Akash Ghosh, Pradeepika Verma, Kitsuchart Pasupa, Sriparna Saha, Dr Priti Singh


Abstract
With the increasing use of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), strong retrieval models have become more important than ever. In healthcare, multimodal retrieval models that combine information from both text and images offer major advantages for many downstream tasks such as question answering, cross-modal retrieval, and multimodal summarization, since medical data often includes both formats. However, there is currently no standard benchmark to evaluate how well these models perform in medical settings. To address this gap, we introduce M3Retrieve, a Multimodal Medical Retrieval Benchmark. M3Retrieve spans 5 domains,16 medical fields, and 4 distinct tasks, with over 1.2 Million text documents and 164K multimodal queries, all collected under approved licenses. We evaluate leading multimodal retrieval models on this benchmark to explore the challenges specific to different medical specialities and to understand their impact on retrieval performance. By releasing M3Retrieve, we aim to enable systematic evaluation, foster model innovation, and accelerate research toward building more capable and reliable multimodal retrieval systems for medical applications.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.771
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
15274–15287
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.771/
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Cite (ACL):
Arkadeep Acharya, Akash Ghosh, Pradeepika Verma, Kitsuchart Pasupa, Sriparna Saha, and Dr Priti Singh. 2025. M3Retrieve: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval for Medicine. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 15274–15287, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
M3Retrieve: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval for Medicine (Acharya et al., EMNLP 2025)
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